The fear of getting blacklisted

Filed in archive Spam News on December 29, 2006

Well, my brother has a web-development company, and although I often wonder how the hack he comes up with some of his more brilliant ideas, I also understand how much knowledge is needed to make a website work perfectly. It's not just the pretty colors, animations and clean code. In this troublesome times one has to know his way around internet security as well to avoid his sites getting hacked, phished, defaced or otherwise used in an evil way.

It is true that we are also getting paranoid in a way. I have caught myself calling up a friend to ask her if she really sent me a .pps Christmas card attached to her e-mail before opening it, because of the recent events. I mean, how much sense does that make?

In fear of spam blacklists come as a natural solution, much as consumer protection groups which list bad businesses, or PeTA people who list companies that torture animals. But you can get blacklisted for as little as someone hacking your site and using your web-forms to send spam. Oral Seymour writes:

"A client called me yesterday scared and hysterical. He got a call from his hosting company. It seems the hosting company had been contacted by two major ISPs concerning spam emails they had traced to my clients domain. It seems that in the last 24 hours the tell-a-friend form had been used to send over 20,000 spam email messages!"

He suggests that no direct mail forms should be used on websites (this goes for blogs too).

But, in addition to the announcement, the hosting company also threatened the client they would cut them loose if the spam instance occurs once more, because the company could get blacklisted. Which would lead to total inability to contact the outer world though e-mail from blacklisted domains. And the blacklist operator would not care if a kindergarten site, a hospital site and a harry potter fansite are also hosted on the same server.

I am asking myself and all of you what the heck is wrong with us if we cannot tolerate an honest human mistake? I know spam is a menace, that it can cram up your inbox and give you a carpal tunnel syndrome from scrolling down to real mail, but are blacklists really the right answer?

It seems to me that we are blocking innocent (if security somewhat illiterate) companies from participating in normal Internet life because we are afraid. As I recall, very little wars were won by running away and hiding. Almost all were won by a courageous fight and giving your 100 percent to the cause.